The millennia-old war between good and evil leaps its unearthly bounds...
The Devil's Day
Black Easter and The Day After Judgment in one volume
by James Blish
7776 room stank of demons.
And it was not just the room-which would have been unusual, but not unprecedented. Demons were not welcome visitors on Monte Albano, where the magic practiced was aimed at a more perfect mystic union with God and His two revelations, the Scriptures and the World....
No, the stench was something in the general air. It was, in fact, something that was abroad in the world...the secular world, God's world, the world at large.
And it would have to be something extraordinarily powerful, extraordinarily malign, for Father Domenico to have detected it without prayer, without ritual, without divination, without instruments or instrumentalities of any kind....None of the White Monks had invoked any infernal power for more than a twelvemonth past....Even the records, which kept themselves without possibility of human intervention, confirmed it. That exhalation from Hell-mouth was drifting up from the world below.
Baines is a bored businessman with a taste for the macabre-a munitions dealer accustomed to fomenting war wherever and whenever he can. But nuclear proliferation has, ironically, been bad for business, and Baines needs something, anything to reverse that trend. His restless mind conceives a
notion that satisfies his desire for profit and amusement both-a scheme for letting loose all the demons of Hell for one night of unfettered destruction-and he commissions Theron Ware, the great Black Magician, to carry out the plan. Ware alone has the ability-and the power-to call up those chained to the darkness. Crimes of violence, chiefly murder, are his specialty. He will arrange for demons to kill almost anyone...for a price. As his scruples are invoked, the fee rises. But for Baines' commission, the payment can't be high enough. For Theron Ware has never before attempted to work his evil skill on such a monstrous scale. And if he cannot call the demons home again, their liberation will be permanent-a catastrophe for the entire human race.